


The Gamzee Meta

by bramblePatch



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Addiction, Archived From Tumblr, Archived from Bramblepatch Blog, Character Analysis, Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, Gen, Meta Essay, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 15:31:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16835446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/pseuds/bramblePatch
Summary: Bramblepatch: arguing for a more nuanced reading of Gamzee Makara since 2011. Several collected essays on Gamzee's motivations leading up to, during, and after the Murderstuck segment, Gamzee's status as a villain, and Gamzee's status as a drug addict and devout adherent of a murdercult.





	1. Sobriety and Mental Break vs. Withdrawal and Downward Spiral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted to my Tumblr February 2014

The thing about Gamzee is that, whenever he can, he ignores and distances himself from what upsets him. He wanders off. He spaces out. He forgets details that make him uncomfortable (up to, and including, his own Aspect). This is probably related to the isolation and neglect that characterized his early childhood. So when Dave sent him that video, which yes, did make him question his religion, he lost his temper but he also _tried to remove himself from the situation_ by leaving the computer lab and isolating himself. This is entirely in line with how he’s behaved in the past. Unfortunately, how he’s behaved in the past also included heavy drug use as a coping mechanism, and that’s not an option for him at this point. So he just isolates himself from the group. 

(And on a slight tangent, let’s not confuse withdrawal and sobriety! Gamzee’s not only not on sopor at this point, he’s pretty clearly still _adjusting_ to not being on sopor. He may be experiencing physical withdrawal symptoms. He’s almost certainly experiencing psychological withdrawal symptoms; prior to seeing the Miracles video he’s already more subdued than he’d been before or during Sgrub. He’s off balance in ways he would not be if he had never been on the slime in the first place, but also in ways that he probably will not be once he’s been sober for a while. Not that he doesn’t have significant issues later that are probably related to his addiction, but he does regain some equilibrium relative to this time period.)

Prior to the murderstuck sequence, Gamzee’s social safety net consists of precisely two people: Karkat and Tavros. No one else except Equius seems to voluntarily speak to Gamzee if there’s another option, and Equius has his own pile of horseshit that makes him unable to offer meaningful support to Gamzee. After Gamzee runs off into the asteroid after having seen the video, he encounters Tavros’s mutilated corpse, and he sends Karkat a series of borderline incoherent, threatening messages. (I’ll admit that, it been a while since my last reread, I’m not entirely clear on which happened first, but both occurred between Gamzee watching Miracles and >Equius: Seek the Highb100d. I’m also not clear on when he acquires Lil Cal, but let’s not forget that the puppet literally houses a portion of Caliborn’s soul and serves as a conduit through which Doc Scratch can directly manipulate Gamzee.) 

Is his desecration of Tavros’s dead body, or his screed at Karkat, the sign of a stable, healthy troll? No. Absolutely not. But at this point, he had not attacked any living person. I suspect that, had Karkat been in any state to offer him support, Gamzee could still have been talked down at this point. Unfortunately - and this is absolutely not Karkat’s fault, because everyone involved was scared thirteen year old kids - Karkat was on the verge of a breakdown himself, having just watched as Eridan assaulted Sollux, killed Feferi and Kanaya, and hopesploded the matriorb. This means that, with Aradiabot’s explosion a few hours before, as far as Karkat knows he’s witnessed the permanent and final death of fully a quarter of the group and the utter destruction of their last chance of surviving as a viable species. He’s in crisis mode, on the verge of panic, and the last thing he needs is Gamzee rambling about how he’s going to kill everyone. Where usually Karkat would tell Gamzee to knock it off and probably look for a way to help him, he freaks out and blocks Gamzee. He simply can’t deal with that right now, and since no one else alive has ever really expressed any concern for or interest in Gamzee’s well being, this means that Gamzee has literally nowhere left to turn except Cal.

Not only is Karkat unable to help Gamzee, he sends Equius to neutralize what he sees as a very real threat to the group. It’s not clear if Gamzee ever had any way of knowing what Karkat said to Equius - he probably didn’t - but there’s a reason I absolutely do not count Equius as part of Gamzee’s support structure. Theirs is not a healthy friendship, and it feeds a lot of the issues that fuel Gamzee’s breakdown. But I still think it’s important to remember that _Equius_ approached _Gamzee_. Gamzee is - badly, unsuccessfully, unhealthily - trying to deal with what has happened and is happening, and he’s confronted with the boy who has never told him anything other than that he deals with things the wrong way. That’s the point where he goes from “dangerously unstable” to “murderous.”

After killing Equius and Nepeta (both of whom _fully intended to try to kill Gamzee,_ which isn’t a mitigating factor but is an important aspect of what was going on), Gamzee reaches out to Karkat again - this time by commenting in a memo Karkat had been interacting with shortly after Eridan’s rampage, and basically says “from your perspective I’m about to kill someone, what are you going to do about it?” In the worst kind of irony, this conversation is probably a deciding factor in Karkat sending Equius after Gamzee in the first place.

It’s only after Equius and Nepeta’s deaths that Gamzee starts actively seeking out other people in person, though - first the x3 showdown (which I honestly don’t know how that would have come out if Kanaya had not showed up, but I think it’s safe to say it would not have been pretty) and then orchestrating the rooftop confrontation.

Could Gamzee have returned to the same state of denial and irreverence he exhibited early in Act 5, after seeing the Miracles video? I don’t know. Maybe not. I suspect that even if he’d been able to re-establish that facade, he’d still have been more fragile and more dangerous than he’d been while on sopor. And he’s absolutely still culpable for everything that he did - all of the threats, the desecration and blood-writing, the manipulation, and the murders and attempted murders. But his breakdown was a progression from bad to worse over a period of hours rather than single abrupt break.


	2. Fandom Reactions to Murderstuck, and, A Comparison of Gamzee and Aranea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted to Tumblr September 2013, in response to the question: _Sorry to bother you, but I'm conducting something of an investigation. Some people have been claiming that Aranea is receiving a much harsher reception than Gamzee simply because she's female. So I was wondering if you might know something about what the fandom opinion on Gamzee was during or immediately after Murderstuck? Thank you in advance._

To my recollection, the overwhelming opinion of Gamzee during/immediately after Murderstuck was confusion and fear. We didn’t understand what was going on, except that Gamzee had snapped and posed a real threat to the other trolls - and there were long stretches where, for instance, we knew he ended up with the cuts on his face but didn’t know how, or where Terezi was unaccounted for and we genuinely thought he might have killed her. “Sober Gamzee” got romanticized a lot; a common fandom portrayal was of him as some kind of mastermind.

Gamzee’s not a mastermind.

And I think that’s where this whole line of questioning is flawed, because Aranea very much _is_.

I really don’t think a comparison between Aranea and Gamzee is fair, because they are such completely different characters, and awful in such completely different ways (and I say this as a fan of both characters). Gamzee is impulsive, unstable, and easy to manipulate. He’s a born minion, but not a very loyal one. He’s bounced from one villain to the next, and whatever his personal agenda is, he plays his cards so close to his chest that he might as well not have any cards. Aranea, on the other hand, is deeply invested in being important in not only her own story but everyone’s; this whole mess is the result of her deciding she’d rather be the antagonist than a secondary character. She’s entirely open about her goals and in fact will monologue about why she is the best whether anyone is interested or not. She’s stubborn, and refuses to listen to what anyone else has to say.

We were also more primed to _expect_ bad behavior from Aranea. She is, after all, an alternate Mindfang, who has from _very_ early in Vriska’s narrative been a clearly present example of what can happen when a Scorpio troll abuses her power. Gamzee was introduced, and consistently portrayed up to the point of his mental break and Murderstuck, as a whimsical, harmless clown.

A more apt comparison, in my view, would be between Aranea and _Eridan_ , who was also introduced as a potential risk to the other characters, and whose short-lived career in villainy was also motivated by self-centeredness and an inflated ego. And Murderstuck was an extremely polarizing arc for the fandom’s perception of Eridan, but it did kind of start to tip fandom opinion away from “poor Eridan, so mistreated by Feferi” and toward “wow what a fuckhead, good on you for getting out, Feferi.”


	3. On the Apparent Lack of Ghost Gamzees

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted to my Tumblr October 2014, in response to the question: _so if we've never seen a gamzee ghost before, does that mean that in every doomed timeline there's a gamzee left wandering the medium, often completely alone except for the corpses of his friends?_

Not necessarily.

When Doomed Dave returned from the “John listens to Terezi and tries to confront his Denizen early, resulting in his death and subsequently Jade’s” timeline to become Davesprite and avert John and Jade’s deaths, Rose was still alive in that timeline. It’s implied that on Dave’s departure, that entire timeline ceased to exist, and doomed!Rose’s memories were to some degree integrated into the primary timeline’s Rose. (At the time, we referred to that instance of Rose as “alpha!Rose” but Act 6 muddied the terminology by assigning the label “alpha” to the post-scratch earth timeline.)

It’s not clear to what extent, and whether this is something specific to Rose (for individual, Class, or Aspect reasons) or whether it would apply to others. My gut feeling is that it’s a Seer thing; it would fit in with the Signless Sufferer’s memories of Beforus, but we’ve never been told that explicitly, and we don’t have corroborating evidence from our third Seer, Terezi. If it _isn’t_ specific to Rose, that means that with no Dead Gamzees, the primary timeline’s Gamzee may have the composite experience of his doubles from every doomed timeline.

Another theory which may have less canon support but I don’t believe to be outright contradicted by anything in canon… just because no one’s ever _seen_ a Dead Gamzee in the dream bubbles doesn’t mean they’re not _there_. Ghosts may seek each other out and travel to each others’ bubbles, but usually there must be some point of common memory from which to start - a conversation, a location, an event. Gamzee spent most of his life in isolation and under the influence of drugs which altered his perceptions and interfered with memory formation; he’s also since proven incredibly adept at avoiding other people in a self-contained environment. There may be any number of Dead Gamzees in the dream bubbles who are unwilling or unable to contact bubbles inhabited by people who are not Gamzee.


End file.
